Here’s a little store in the big dirty city. Candy, cigarettes, newspapers, soda pop, ice cream, and long, long hours. People who run stores like this grow old and die without anyone ever having noticed.
You think about that store when you read about some Korean grocer being boycotted. Or some Arab being told he doesn’t belong. And community leaders saying, “We’ve got to talk.”
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He remembers mothers, carrying bags of stuff he could have sold them, bringing their children in to buy penny candy with change from someone else’s store.
Remembers the woman who called the police because he was selling “fireworks.” Items that can be bought at any Walgreen store before any Fourth of July. Went to court three times before that was finally thrown out.
Sometimes he even agreed with them.
The guy who owned that chicken store kept a .22 rifle above the cash register.
Our print shop had rats. We were across the street from a grain elevator and connected to it by our basements. In Blue Island, the town where I grew up, there seemed to be an awful lot of connecting basements, a kind of underground world that has gotten much larger in my dreams. But this print shop and this grain elevator did connect, and we did get the rats.
